Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Monday, May 20, 2013

Highly Recommended: The Jihadist Plot — The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion

A remarkable development took place in
the midst of the 2011 conflict in Libya: the United States and its allies
changed sides in the war on terror. From virtually the very start of
the unrest in Libya in mid-February 2011, there were troubling signs
that the insurgents, whom the Western media insisted on presenting
as peaceful “protestors,” were in fact violent Islamic extremists whose
methods bore a clear resemblance to those of al-Qaeda. Indeed, the
methods of the rebels—including beheadings and summary group
executions by shots to the back of the head—clearly resembled not
merely those of al-Qaeda, but of that branch of al-Qaeda that was
most notorious for its brutality: namely, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s
al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The resemblance, as it turns out, was not accidental. Famous for
its religious fanaticism, the eastern Libyan heartland of the Libyan
rebellion was in fact well-known in counter-terrorism circles as a
hotbed of support for al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq.

… The streets of Benghazi were in fact awash with al-Qaeda flags in the days following Libya’s “liberation.”

From John Rosenthal comes The Jihadist Plot (The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion), which tells you everything that you (and that Hillary Clinton) always wanted to know about Benghazi but never thought to ask — and then some.

“How could this happen? How could this happen in a country we
helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?” Thus
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed what she supposed was
the reaction of many Americans to the September 11, 2012 attacks in
Benghazi that left American ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and
three other Americans dead. The questioning and self-doubt showed
“just how confounding the world can be,” Clinton observed. But the
world is not so confounding when one is correctly informed, andthe
Benghazi attacks are not so confusing and “senseless” as the Obama
administration insists. They are in fact the direct consequence of
American policy in supporting the Libyan rebellion against Muammar
al-Qaddafi, and they make perfect sense when one knows how thoroughly
the rebel forces were affiliated with and inspired by al-Qaeda.

Those same forces proudly fly the al-Qaeda flag to this day. They
do so not in secretive “jihadi encampments”—such as those for
which drones dispatched by the Obama administration are reportedly searching in Eastern Libya. They do so rather in broad daylight
on the main boulevards of Benghazi and other Libyan cities. One
does not need drones or sophisticated surveillance technology to find
them. Videos of the military parades of the Libyan mujahideen—to
use their own preferred terminology—are readily available on local
Arabic-language websites and YouTube pages.